Four survive 32 days adrift in Pacific by eating coconuts

Four people survived a month adrift in the Pacific by eating coconuts and drinking rainwater in an ordeal that claimed the lives of eight of their companions, including a baby, reports said yesterday. The group, from Papua New Guinea’s Bougainville province, are believed to have spent 32 days at sea. The Solomon Star News reported the group set off from Bougainville on December 22, intending to celebrate Christmas in the Carteret Islands, about 100 kilometres (62 miles) away.

But survivor Dominic Stally said their small boat capsized and a number of the group drowned. The rest managed to right the vessel but there were further fatalities as they floated in the remote waters at the mercy of powerful ocean currents. “We could do nothing with their dead bodies, we just have to let go of them at sea,” he told the newspaper.

“A couple have died and left behind their baby and I am the one who held onto the baby and later the baby died as well.” Stally said a number of fishing vessels passed nearby without noticing them until they were finally picked up on January 23 off New Caledonia after drifting some 2,000 kilometres.

The Star News said the survivors comprised two men, a woman and a girl aged about 12. They were dropped off in Honiara, the capital of the Solomon Islands, last Saturday and were discharged into the care of Papua New Guinea’s High Commissioner John Balavu after receiving treatment for dehydration. The High Commissioner and medics at the Honiara hospital were not immediately available for comment.

Epic tales of survival are not uncommon in the Pacific, where tiny islands are separated by vast expanses of ocean. In January 2014, Salvadoran fisherman Jose Alvarenga washed up in the Marshalls, more than 13 months after he set off from Mexico’s west coast with a companion, who died during the voyage. He survived by eating raw fish and bird flesh while keeping hydrated by drinking rainwater, turtle blood and his own urine.

His remarkable feat was initially greeted with scepticism, but he passed a polygraph test and an examination of ocean currents and boating records backed his claim. An Indonesian teenager survived seven weeks at sea in 2018 after his tiny fishing trap lost its moorings and ended up some 2,500 kilometres away off Guam.